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Search engine Cuil (pronounce it however the hell you want to, but apparently they prefer “cool”) launched yesterday to a whole lot of “Google-killer” OMG vibes. And thus far, it really rather sucks.

The home page is Google-simplistic: Logo. Input box. Search button. Over-inflated index count. About link. Privacy link. On black. (Which is, I hear, the new black.) Start typing and a helpful suggest engine ala Google Suggest pops up. Cheers.

Try to search. One of several things will happen. Since we’re out of the “our servers are cooked” phase of things, chances are, you’ll get a results page. But if you were lucky to give it a shot early on, you’d just be flat presented with a “no results found” page. I searched “web application development” and “web development” and both came up with a 0-results page. This is apparently because the caching system isn’t able to retrieve results on the first request so instead places them in a queue. Except that Cuil doesn’t bother telling you that they’re still getting their shit together and that you’ll need to check back when they’ve actually pulled and cached those results. Not that you’d want to. Here’s why, after the jump.

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Tagged with: arrington, cuil, google, index size, indexing, interface design, Rants, relevance, search, techcrunch, yahoo!

Posted in: Rants

Adobe announced today that they were delivering a special optimized Flash player for search robots, allowing search engines like Google and Yahoo to index not just a page’s non-Flash content, not just the content of the static data already indexed within a Flash movie, but the entire contents of each path taken throughout the Flash interface, entirely:

Adobe has provided Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! that allows their search spiders to navigate through a live SWF application as if they were virtual users. The Flash Player technology, optimized for search spiders, runs an SWF file similarly to how the file would run in Adobe Flash Player in the browser, yet it returns all of the text and links that occur at any state of the application back to the search spider, which then appears in search results to the end user.

This is an interesting approach that will really change the game for a lot of rich internet application providers. Anyone developing applications on the Flex platform knows that lacking the ability to make their dynamic content indexable is an IMMENSE drawback, especially when so much traffic is driven by search engines now. This changes the game. More on how, after the jump.

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Tagged with: adobe flash, flash, flash indexing, flex, flex applications, google, indexable swfs, search, search engines, swf, yahoo!

Posted in: Cool Stuff

As you may or may not know, when creating a Google Ad for insertion in their AdWords or AdSense network, (the ads that appear beneath search results or alongside 3rd party content, respectively) you can embed the relevant keyword that triggered your ad into the ad copy itself. This is pretty useful for creating a single ad template and applying it across multiple keywords while still maintaining relevance.

For example: If you were creating an ad for selling shoes, you might use shoes, nike, adidas, reebok as your keywords. The ad copy might read:
Buy cheap shoes!
But it’d be much more compelling if it parroted back my search term to me:
Buy cheap Nike shoes!

Learn how to make this happen in your campaigns, after the jump. Or learn about our AdWords Campaign Management services right now.

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Tagged with: adsense, adwords, dynamic keywords, google, google adwords, keywords, optimization, seo

Posted in: Development

The development for open source software is strong and growing. Open source software is software in which the source code is publicly available for examination or contribution. If you talk to a typical person or business, you’ll usually find that their computers are all running Windows and have Microsoft Office installed. Some may even have more expensive software installed like the Adobe Creative Suite applications. By buying and using such high-priced software, it is easy to shell out two or three times as much money on software than on the computer itself. With many capable alternatives, there is a lot of money to be saved by utilizing free and open source software.

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Tagged with: eclipse, extension, firefox, gmail, google, mozilla, open source, projects, software

Posted in: Cool Stuff, How To

We suggest to every client we have, no matter their business or their market, to blog often about what they know. (When they don’t know much, we tell them to fake it.) <nearly-self-evident statement> Blogs are a powerful way to boost your search engine results and to drive further organic traffic to your site. </nearly-self-evident statement> I bring you through all the tasty details after the jump.

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Tagged with: blogging, feed readers, feeds, google, google reader, opml, organic search, pagerank, rss, seo

Posted in: Development